Each year, the National Center for Education Statistics hosts the STATS DC Data Conference. This year's conference was held in Washington D.C. on August 1-3. Two MNPS employees presented at this conference.

Laura Hansen, MNPS Director of Information Management and Decision Support, was part of a expert panel on Wednesday, August 2nd entitled, A Tense Marriage: Governing the Relationships Among Data Interoperability, Security, and Privacy. This session discussed the tension between balancing the needs to support students and teacher in experiencing high quality learning experiences while maintaining appropriate barriers and privacy protections for students.

Dr. Margie Johnson, MNPS Collaborative Inquiry Coordinator, co-presented with Dr. Stephanie Wilkerson, president of Magnolia Consulting, on Wednesday, August 2nd about MNPS' journey to implementing collaborative inquiry data use practices throughout the district. The session entitled, A District's Journey of Implementing Effective Data Use Practices, shared MNPS's data journey toward developing and implementing the Data-Informed Decision-making Ecosystem, of which collaborative inquiry is the heart of the ecosystem and serves as a guide for empowering educators to use data, no matter the source, for making informed decisions. Tools developed to support the implementation of the ecosystem, including the Teacher Data Use Survey and MNPS IC Map for Collaborative Inquiry were shared with participants. The PowerPoint for this session is available HERE.

(Stephanie and I also have a published article mentioned in the PowerPoint. If you would like a copy of it, please email me requesting a copy.)

The presentations from the conference should be available online soon. If you want to check out their website, you can access it at http://www.mnpscollaboration.org/collaboration-corner-blog/ci-update-do-you-understand-the-words-coming-out-of-my-mouth.

If you need any support with collaborative inquiry and/or have a story to tell, please contact Margie Johnson at margie.johnson@mnps.org.

On August 4, 2017, I had the privilege of helping with the MNPS Poverty Simulation as a vendor while Hull Jackson Montessori School and Jones Paideia School educators participated in the simulation. During the simulation, I was a representative for the Office of Immigration and Customs, which I selected because all of my children are immigrants, and we had to go through the process of getting them US Citizenship. In this role, I had to deport undocumented participants either by having their name provided as part of the simulation directions or by them being in trouble with law enforcement. The critical part of the simulation is to see the behaviors that are exhibited during the simulation. It certainly is a wonderful learning experience.

I thank Allison for bringing this professional learning experience to MNPS. Furthermore, I thank her for the partnership of having schools take a data dive using the collaborative inquiry process as a follow-up discussion for establishing an action plan for supporting our students.

If you are interested in using collaborative inquiry for facilitating data conversations and leveraging collaborative expertise, please contact Margie Johnson at margie.johnson@mnps.org.

Beginning the School Year with Collaborative Inquiry

According to John Hattie (2015), “the largest barrier to student learning is within-school variability” (p. 1). He recommends that what works best in education is empowering schools to leverage the collaborative expertise of the educators within a building. If often tell teams that I work with that if we had the answer, then we would have implemented it already. However, education faces complex issues today.

Therefore, MNPS’ Collaborative Inquiry process, developed by the MNPS Community of Practice (Haynes Middle, Margaret Allen Middle, Two Rivers Middle, West End Middle, and Wright Middle), is about empowering MNPS educators to use data and educator expertise for addressing a variety of complex issues in order to ensure all MNPS students are successful.

I am excited to share that three schools started the 2017-2018 school year off by engaging in collaborative inquiry to have deep conversations about a variety of topics.

Mr. Todd Irving, also being new to Joelton Middle, wanted to leverage educator expertise to develop new vision and mission statements for the 2017-2018 school year. On Friday, July 28th, Joelton Middle’s leadership team convened and used the collaborative inquiry process to develop vision and mission statements. To read about their collaborative inquiry journey, click http://www.mnpscollaboration.org/joelton-middle-vision-and-mission.html

If you have a collaborative inquiry story to share and/or need support with the collaborative inquiry process, please feel free to contact…

References:Hattie, J. (2015). What works best in education: The politics of collaborative expertise. London, UK: Pearson.